history_areafandomcom-20200215-history
Charles Lindbergh
Charles Augustus Lindbergh (February 4, 1897 – 1937), nicknamed Slim,Lucky Lindy, and The Lone Eagle, was an American aviator, author, inventor, military officer, explorer, and social activist. As a 25-year-old U.S. Air Mail pilot, Lindbergh emerged suddenly from virtual obscurity to instantaneous world fame as the result of his Orteig Prize-winning solo nonstop flight on May 20–21, 1927, made from the Roosevelt Field1 in Garden City on New York's Long Island to Le Bourget Field in Paris, France, a distance of nearly 3,600 statute miles (5,800 km), in the single-seat, single-engine, purpose-built Ryan monoplane Spirit of St. Louis. As a result of this flight, Lindbergh was the first person in history to be in New York one day and Paris the next. The record setting flight took 33 hours and 30 minutes. Lindbergh, a U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve officer, was also awarded the nation's highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor, for his historic exploit. He worked with Amelia Earhart in the Maddux Airlines during 1935 and 1937. Biography Although born in Detroit, Michigan, on February 4, 1897, Charles Augustus Lindbergh, spent most of his childhood in Little Falls, Minnesota, and Washington, D.C. He was the third child of Swedish immigrant Charles August Lindbergh (1859–1924), and only child of his second wife, Evangeline Lodge Land Lindbergh (1876–1954), of Detroit, although the Lindberghs separated in 1909 when their son was seven.Lindbergh's father, a U.S. Congressman (R-Minnesota (6th)) from 1907 to 1917, was one of just 50 House members to vote against (373–50) the entry of the U.S. into World War I.Mrs. Lindbergh was a chemistry teacher at Cass Technical High School in Detroit and later at Little Falls Senior High School from which her son graduated on June 5, 1918. Lindbergh also attended over a dozen other schools from Washington, D.C., to California, during his childhood and teenage years (none for more than a year or two), including the Force School and Sidwell Friends School while living in Washington with his father, and Redondo Union High School in Redondo Beach, California, while living there with his mother.Although he enrolled in the College of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in late 1920, Lindbergh dropped out in the middle of his sophomore year and then headed for Lincoln, Nebraska, in March 1922 to begin flight training. as military USASRC March during the WWI.]] rom an early age, Charles Lindbergh had exhibited an interest in the mechanics of motorized transportation, including his family's Saxon Six automobile, and later his Excelsior motorbike. By the time he started college as a mechanical engineering student, he had also become fascinated with flying, though he "had never been close enough to a plane to touch it."After quitting college in February 1922, Lindbergh enrolled as a student at the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation's flying school in Lincoln two months later and flew for the first time in his life on April 9, 1922, when he took to the air as a passenger in a two-seat Lincoln Standard "Tourabout" biplane trainer piloted by Otto Timm. A few days later, Lindbergh took his first formal flying lesson in that same machine with instructor-pilot Ira O. Biffle, although the then 20-year-old student pilot was never permitted to "solo" during his time at the school because he could not afford to post a bond which the company President Ray Page insisted upon in the event the novice flyer were to damage the school's only trainer in the process.To both gain some needed flight experience and earn money for additional instruction, Lindbergh left Lincoln in June to spend the next few months barnstorming across Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana as a wing walker and parachutist with E.G. Bahl and later H.L. Lynch. During this time, he also briefly held a job as an airplane mechanic in Billings, Montana, working at the Billings Municipal Airport (later renamed Billings Logan International Airport). Following a few months of barnstorming through the South, the two pilots parted company in San Antonio, Texas, where Lindbergh had been ordered to report to Brooks Field on March 19, 1924, to begin a year of military flight training with the United States Army Air Service both there and later at nearby Kelly Field.Late in his training, Lindbergh experienced his most serious flying accident on March 5, 1925, eight days before graduation. He was involved in a midair collision with another Army S.E.5 while practicing aerial combat maneuvers and was forced to bail out.Only 18 of the 104 cadets who started flight training a year earlier remained when Lindbergh graduated first overall in his class in March 1925, thereby earning his Army pilot's wings and a commission as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Air Service Reserve Corps. After his son's death,Lindbergh comes into depression for a time and after returning to his activities with aircraft,this same time he met Amelia Earhart,then they become,traveling partners. As an otherwise unknown young Contract Air Mail pilot, acquiring financing to buy a plane and meet the other expenses related to the overall New York to Paris effort had been a major challenge for Lindbergh, who began with only $2,000 of his own money from his savings and his $175 biweekly salary earned flying the U.S. Air Mail for RAC. Eventually, he was able to secure local funding for the purchase of the Spirit, however, by way of a $15,000 State National Bank of St. Louis loan made on February 18, 1927, to St. Louis businessmen Harry H. Knight and Harold M. Bixby, the project's two principal backers and trustees.3 Another $1,000 was donated by Frank Robertson of RAC on the same day, giving Lindbergh and his backers a relatively modest $18,000 with which to compete against his much more highly funded rivals for the $25,000 Orteig Prize. The group tried but was unable to purchase a suitable existing design single or multiengine monoplane from Wright Aeronautical (Wright-Bellanca) of Paterson, New Jersey, Travel Air of Wichita, Kansas, and finally Charles Levine's and Giuseppi Bellanca's newly formed Columbia Aircraft Corporation of Hempstead, New York, unless Lindbergh and his backers would agree to allow the manufacturer to select the pilot.The group thus turned to B.F. Mahoney's much smaller Ryan Aircraft Company in San Diego which agreed to design and build such a monoplane "from the ground up" for $10,580, and on February 25, a deal was formally struck.Dubbed the Spirit of St. Louis, the fabric-covered, single-seat, single-engine "Ryan NYP" high-wing monoplane (CAB registration: N-X-211) was designed jointly by Lindbergh and the Ryan Company's chief engineer, Donald A. Hall.The Spirit flew for the first time just two months later, on April 28, 1927, and after completing a series of test flights, Lindbergh took off from San Diego on May 10 for St. Louis and on to Roosevelt Field on New York's Long Island from which he would take off for Paris just 10 days later. In July 1937 , he and Amelia is sent on a mission in the Pacific ocean but they never returned,a few days after,they are given as deceased in action. Icon Category:Lindbergh & Earhart Category:Aviators Category:Writers Category:Aviation missions in Atlantic ocean